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Early Mac Software

All of the following Mac projects were done by Harry Chesley as an independent software developer. They are resurrected here for historical interest. I doubt any of these have any practical value at this point in time. In some cases, the source code is also provided, again for historical purposes only.

PackIt: file bundling, compression, and encryption

PackIt was a file bundling, compression, and encryption utility. Although it was very popular for a number of years, it was ultimately displaced by StuffIt (original name, huh?).

For the curious, the source code for PackIt III can be found here. The file format for PackIt is described in an article in MacDeveloper Magazine #6 (see below).

vco: online visual conferencing

vco was a visual conferencing environment. It worked with several online conferencing systems (like today’s IRC), first with Delphi, but later with GEnie and The WELL. It represented users as icons, and also spoke what they typed using Macintalk.

The original version of vco had a single conference table around which all the participants gathered. A follow-on version, known as vco+, allowed for multiple rooms with different backgrounds. The following two screenshots are from vco+:

The original vco required users to create their online face icons using the Macintosh resource editor, saving them into a “face file” for each user, which were exchanged prior to the online session. vco+ added a face editor, which allowed people without resource editing skills to create faces:

The vco+ version was developed together with Mitch Waite (The Waite Group) and Anthony Bay.

MacDeveloper Magazine

MacDeveloper Magazine was a free, on-line magazine for Macintosh developers publish in 1985 and 1986. It was intended to be advertiser-supported, but the advertiser part never quite materialized. The magazine lasted for six issues. Below are text-only versions of all six issues (warning: the original MacDeveloper Magazine was published in MacWrite format; this version was translated into plain text, and a lot of formatting has gotten lost in the translation — the original looked much nicer):